Monday, December 14, 2009

'Twas the Lesson Before Christmas...

This week is my last week of lessons this year! Hard to believe, isn't it? I woke up this morning and decided that I wanted to do something special for my students this week, so I chose to do these 5 little things that were a whole lot of fun!

I made up a rule for lessons this week - no lesson books allowed! Instead... We played Christmas songs exclusively and did this fun Light Up The Tree Worksheet by Susan Paradis instead of theory books. (Hint: My kids LOVED using Neon Crayola Twistables instead of the usual colored pencils, because it made the lights "glow")

Of course, what fun would a lesson be without GAMES! I did some surfing online and chose Susan Paradis's Snowflake Keyboard Race, which all of my students absolutely LOVED! (We couldn't just play it once - they requested to play it several times over!) I also downloaded and printed Wendy Stevens's Name That Christmas Tune. I used it as a sight-reading exercise (play it and name the tune). Remarkably, even the kids who are challenging to work with when it comes to sight-reading - enjoyed and were successful at this game! (And those cards aren't exactly easy, either!)

To top off the lesson each student earned a Christmas sticker for their sticker collections (more on that another day) and a candy cane or Christmas cookie.

While I can't make every lesson this fun, it certainly was a fun tradition that I look forward to repeating in the years to come!

1 comment:

Rebecca said...

Hi, Rebecca! I stopped by your site after seeing you on the Faber forum because we share a first name and last initial. I have done something similar for "last lesson before Christmas." The week earlier I assign the students to perform a Christmas concert for me. They will even drag out previous years' books to practice/perform. This year I was able to record a number of them and send them home a CD of their music. Very fun.